Teamwork needed to tackle blight

One of many examples of blight in Donora, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH, Pa. ¬ – A nonprofit in Pittsburgh that promotes smart growth is suggesting the formation of a panel to address the growing problem of residential blight in the region.

Sustainable Pittsburgh this month released a report, Southwestern Pennsylvania Blighted and Abandoned Properties Solution Project, that identified a staggering list of 67,886 abandoned housing units in this corner of the state.

“The report substantiates that addressing blight and abandonment offers the chance to build assets in a community and deliver economic, environmental, and social equity benefits for both community and the region as a whole,” the report states.

However, there is no regional plan, decision-making body or coordinated effort to deal with this crisis that has impeded economic recovery.

Teamwork would foster and environment that would help create jobs, including those associated with demolition, and increase the value of properties whose owners still take pride in them, the report shows.

Here in the mid-Mon Valley in such municipalities as Charleroi and Donora, there is a perception that blight is epidemic and that local, county and state officials are not adequately addressing the problem. Houses are added each year to demolition lists through a complicated and costly system of obtaining legal permits to tear down ugly, decrepit buildings.

However, such municipalities typically do not see the real value in buying these houses, Sustainable Pittsburgh has concluded. A municipality’s property assets can increase their bonds, and it stands to gain significant sums of taxable income by putting vacant lots back on the market.

Someone with a good job might also want to invest in a house in one of these dying towns if the blight was erased. That is preferable to every other house being stripped of their copper by thieves after their last occupants move elsewhere.

Props to senior citizens

Jeff Nystrom, a commissioner for the newly-organized National Senior League of Wii bowling, left, awaits the results of its championship match that left the Charleroi, Pa., team, whose members also are shown, in a disappointing second place.

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – We are excited to announce it’s senior citizen week at this blog.

Yesterday, Travel with a Beveridge visited a senior citizens center in California, Pa., where older Americans were giving their brains a workout while singing Christmas carols in the German language.

The excitement peaked today in nearby Charleroi where members of Riverside Place Senior Center lost to Florida in the first National Senior League Wii bowling championship games.

Here is bit of the reporting of the match pulled from the Observer-Reporter newspaper:

Sighs of disappointment swept across (the room) when the four bowlers and about 30 of their fans learned Charleroi had fallen by 20 points.

“We did our best. We were the underdogs,” said Charleroi Wii bowler Cathy Martini, 52, of Roscoe.

No one cried. Rather, they immediately began to make plans to practice more and assemble a better team for next year’s championships.

The NSL was organized by Dennis Berkholtz of Atlanta, Ga. He played team handball in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics and wants to turn the senior Wii games into a business to provide more exciting activities for seniors, said Jeff Nystrom, an NSL commissioner who also lives in Atlanta.

Berkholtz may be onto something because, while the video gaming industry has been in a recession-era slump, Nintendo’s Wii grew in popularity among senior citizens, National Public Radio reported in July. The championship games even caught the eye of editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper, which dispatched a reporter and photographer to this small borough in the big city’s hinterlands to record the excitement.

Meanwhile, these new video bowling leagues attracted 186 teams from 24 states without a fee this year. Next year, though, it will cost $400 for a team to enter the contests.

“Wii makes it easy,” Nystrom said. “It keeps them active and it’s a great way for them to mingle.”

Larry Maraldo, 67, emerged as the most-valuable player for Charleroi, having “bowled” two perfect games. Cathy Cochran, 57, who has blurred vision, scored a number of strikes, too, despite her handicaps that also require her to use a wheelchair.

They had loads of fun. That’s all that counts. This blog will be hard-pressed to top this excitement tomorrow unless those kooky old ladies from Monongahela decide again to bare their shoulders for a naughty calendar to raise money for a good cause. It could happen.

A lucky soldier

A stack of yellowed letters, parts of a U.S. Army uniform and a Nazi armband are among the items my father, James R. Beveridge, saved from his participation in World War II.

Part II: Stirring the memories of war

By Scott Beveridge

The pay earned by a U.S. Army private during World War II was not attractive to my dad when he enlisted in the military and earned that rank after leaving a steel job in Monessen.

Industrial work was picking up in America in the early 1940s because President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised England he would supply its defense with steel and other war supplies in place of troops to fend off German invasion.

Dad said he would have preferred to continue working at Pages Steel and Wire Corp, a Pennsylvania mill that wove fence from steel billets produced at the blast furnaces at the nearby Pittsburgh Steel Co. The mills paid quite bit more money than the $50 a month he would earn each month in the military after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war.

By 1943, dad valued a good-paying job, having been raised during the Great Depression and suffered the difficulties of moving from one town to the next while his father, Robert, found work in any number of temporary jobs.

His family was always met an unwelcome outsider to a new town at a time when one in four men were jobless. His father was seen as being there to steal a job opportunity from a local man. As a result, dad had to quickly learn how to do battle with the other boys his age and older.

Dad's family finally arrived in Charleroi, Pa. when was in the ninth grade, and he immediately felt at home there after attending as many as 20 public schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Charleroi, though, was a money town with two long downtown streets lined with expensive shops and department stores. The town was nicknamed the “Magic City” because it developed so quickly in the 1890s, and would later break records for having some of the highest retail sales in Pennsylvania. Located upwind from a string of dirty mills along the Monongahela River, its air was clean and sidewalks were filled to their brink with only the best-dressed people from throughout the region.

Even though work was picking up and his father had found work as a welder at a Monessen steel mill, dad's parents were quick to consider packing up the family once more for a move to another town. Dad said he threatened to drop out of high school if they moved, so they stayed.

His father would live long enough to see him graduate in 1940 from Charleroi High School before dying, unexpectedly, from a stroke. His mother, Madge, was about to become all alone in her world after the war called away her two sons.

Dad's only sibling, Thomas, was three years his junior and he joined the Army, too, in 1944 after lying about his age.

Their mother received regular allotments from them, money that was withdrawn from their military salaries and matched by the government because she was without a husband and dependent on their incomes to survive. She also took jobs as a housemaid to get by and regularly kept in touch with her sons via a steady stream of letters they exchanged and would keep for the remainder of their lives.

These old memories surfaced again in May 2005 when dad retrieved a white gift box he used to store his tokens from the war to tell this story.

His collection contained a red, white, and black cotton Nazi armband, something he rarely pulled out because of what it represented, and because it was against U.S. law to bring home such items seized from the enemy.

He also kept his olive green and moth-worn Army hat, routine military paperwork, and a number of letters his friends and relatives mailed his mother from the war.

The bulk of those letters were written by dad to reassure his mother that he was fit, “in the pink,” and safe, words he purposely selected to keep her free from worry.

Yet, some of them spoke to these soldiers longing for such luxuries as a warm bed, home-cooked meals or dates with a hometown gal as they dealt with the insanities of war.

Their words also carried with them profound war experiences, details that had been stored away for decades before dad retrieved the mementos from his dusty closet.

My dad, James R. Beveridge, left, and his brother, Thomas, with their mother, Madge, in 1940 after they arrived in Charleroi, Pa. With the Great Depression ending, World War II would soon be calling the brothers to the U.S. Army.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part III: Dad's friends and relatives weren't so lucky)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

This blight is an old victim of America's recession

This abandoned building was demolished with federal blight money in 2008 before it collapsed in downtown Charleroi, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – My grandmother knew how to show a kid a good time five decades ago in her adopted hometown of Charleroi in the middle reaches of the Monongahela River valley.

Madge Sine Beveridge would sometimes board a bus then with me in tow for the short trip from our home in Webster, Pa., to that borough also known as the Magic City on the day she received her Social Security monthly benefits.

The streets and alleyways were bustling in the early 1960s with shoppers, merchants, bankers, lawyers and wives of the steelworkers and coal miners whose paychecks kept the cash registers chiming.

Grandma would first stop at her bank with a granite and marble lobby on Fifth Street to convert the check to cash while I waited in the quiet lobby parked on a cold leather chair. My eyes would remain fixed on the gumball machine off to the side until she gave it a penny to make me happy.

The afternoon typically disappeared in the Coyle Theater, a workingman’s movie palace that was once a burlesque house, where she preferred to catch a Jerry Lewis slapstick comedy.

The idyllic day wasn’t complete without an ice cream sundae at Isaly’s, a white tiled dairy and meat chain store that was famous throughout the region for its tall skyscraper cones and chipped ham. Their glorious sundaes were served with a cherry and a signature pretzel twist on top.

With our sugar cravings satisfied, we’d wait next door at the Murphy’s five and dime store for the next bus back to Webster while its lunch counter clanged in time with waitresses passing around dishes and bowls of cheap food.

Grandma loved Charleroi where she settled near the end of the Great Depression about the same time she became a young widow. She stayed there while her two sons served in World War II and until 1960 when she followed our young family out of town. Yet Charleroi would remain the place to be seen for at least another two decades.

She would be appalled, though, to see what has happened to the town and its surrounds in the decades since the steel and coal industries collapsed in the region.

The old Murphy’s on Fallowfield Avenue is now a dollar story, while many of the storefronts across the street are vacant, as are many of the others in the downtown that had more shoe and clothing stores than have most modern malls.

So much of the worker housing on each end of the town is vacant and rundown. The blight only worsens on the steep hill above the downtown where houses are stripped of their copper and other valuables as soon as their occupants leave them.

In this harsh economy with a 9.5 percent unemployment rate in the United States, such industrial cities as Detroit have captured headlines for their blight and having an even higher rate of joblessness and desperation.

But, places like Charleroi and a string of fading Pennsylvania boomtowns from the upriver Brownsville to Aliquippa on the lower Ohio River and beyond in America’s rust been have been bleeding jobs for decades.

This ugly recession is old news to them.

Socialism isn't a bad word here

A Louis Goaziou poster promoting a circa 1949 meeting circa of United Steelworkers of America Local 1758 at the Slovak Hall in Donora, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – A historical society restoring a print shop founded by a famous Socialist in America’s labor movement has discovered a time capsule inside the century-old building where time has been frozen for as many years.

Members of Charleroi Area Historical Society, while moving heavy shelves in the Louis Goaziou Building, found printing proofs of his jobs to make posters advertising the many unions that once held power in the Mon Valley.

“I mean the whole place is a time capsule, really,” said Nikki Sheppick, chairman of the society in Charleroi, Pa., a town that was a hotbed for union activism during the 1920s and 1940s.

Goaziou’s legacy was destroyed by his relatives in a hurry during U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's 10-year witch hunt to rid the country of Communists through 1957. To avoid problems, the Goaziou family burned everything that linked it to Louis Goaziou, who has been called the most-prominent leader of the Franco-American Socialist Movement.

He was born March 22, 1864, in Scrignac County in the French province of Brittany, where his family raised him to be a priest. He shunned the church, immigrated to America in 1880 and settled in Charleroi, where he published a French-language newspaper, L’Union Des Travailleurs, which, when translated, means The Union of Workers.

In an earlier propaganda sheet, Goaziou promoted the violent Pullman Strike against railroads in 1894. Later, he touted visits to Charleroi by Eugene V. Debs during that man’s unsuccessful bid on Socialist ticket for the White House and the spunky coal mining activist known as Mother Jones.

But behind the shelves of his shop, Sheppick found on a windowsill under an inch of dust a stack of print jobs for unions, work that sustained the Goazious on a day-to-day basis.

There she found a ticket stub for a 1923 boxing match in Charleroi, an event that cost $2 plus a 20-cent tax to pay down the debt of World War I. There are other signs promoting union meetings at U.S. Steel mills in nearby Donora, as well as those for a bar run by a union bartender, a union barbershop and the Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Projectionists.

The printing presses, and all the type that went into these posters, remain to this day where Goaziou arranged them in his modest, two-story brick storefront building.

Yet it’s going to take some time for this museum at 807 Fallowfield Ave. to open to the general public. The society is wading through the complicated steps of winning architectural and borough approval to erect handicap ramps to the entrances, something that could happen as early as November.

Click here to read more about Goaziou on this blog.

Charleroi transformed

Here is a great shot of North Charleroi, Pa., taken from the air before the dam, at right, along the Monongahela River was relocated in the 1930s.

Some 80 years later, the replacement locks and dam is undergoing renovations to keep navigation moving at a quicker pace on the Mon.


Click here to see the top photo in a larger format.
Ditto here to see the other one huge.

(The old photo is courtesy of the Charleroi Area Historical Society while the new one is property of the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa.)

Threatened Mon River bridges admirered

A few people who attended the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh last weekend admire the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge, a closed span that is under threat of demolition. Meanwhile, major improvements to Locks and Dam No. Four continue in the distance.

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – The aging Donora-Webster Bridge appears to be in better shape than many spans its age in the United States, a group of bridge experts agrees.

“This bridge has a coat of paint on it,” said Luke Gordon, a construction inspector from Michigan who visited the historic span Saturday with other bridge enthusiasts. “It’s 10-times better than most I’ve seen.”

Organizers of the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh included weekend stops in southwestern Pennsylvania at the Donora-Webster Bridge and the similarly built, nearby 103-year-old Charleroi-Monessen Bridge because both of their futures are uncertain.

Outside of Allegheny County, the bridges are among just four Pennsylvania through-truss, pin connected spans still standing along the Monongahela River. The others are in Point Marion and Brownsville, and all are on the National Register of Historic Places because they were pinned together using technology borrowed from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, within a year the Charleroi-Monessen could be demolished. A new bridge would then be built on the same site if the plan clears the scrutiny of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The Point Marion Bridge will be gone, too, after a new replacement span opens in November.

“Bridge heritage is at risk,” said Eric DeLony of Santa Fe, a retired chief engineer for the National Park Service who also attended the bridge conference.

He was among a dozen such experts attending the conference who toured the 101-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge. Some took photographs, while others said they admired its graceful lines.

The span became the first toll free bridge to open on the Mon, allowing the older community of Webster to share in the new wealth of Donora after a sprawling steel mill opened within its borders. The bridge was originally painted black for the coal in Webster’s hills and gray for the smoke that billowed from the mills.

The bridge also stood alongside the infamous Donora zinc works, which contributed to a 1948 smog that killed at least 20 local residents and became the catalyst for America’s first clean air laws.

“Donora, probably more than any other town, has the history as to why people would want to come see this bridge,” said Todd Wilson, a civil engineering consultant from Pittsburgh who helped to organize the conference. “This bridge was here and it did play its part in that story.”

It appears the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has done a good job maintaining this bridge. It’s guard rails were not attached its main vertical beams to protect the superstructure from damage by vehicle accidents, Gordon said.

However, there is speculation PennDOT will begin scrutinizing this bridge after it completes the historical review process on the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge that has been closed to traffic since February. The closure of that span followed an inspection that discovered a badly deteriorated pin joint supporting a deck.

People in the struggling Mon Valley towns need to band together to save these historic spans if there is any hope for the area to become a historic tourism destination, said Nikki Sheppick, a historian in Charleroi.

“If we don’t keep these assets, we’re dead,” Sheppick said during the conference stop in Charleroi.

Friday night football in Shovel Row

We lived in 1958-59 in one of the houses to the right along Shovel Row, shown in this photo circa 1895 taken during a flood along the Monongahela River in Charleroi, Pa. Photo courtesy of Charleroi Area Historical Society.

By Scott Beveridge

My earliest memories were born at age 3 on the wrong side of the tracks.

They come from 1958 while our family lived in a four-room, shabby duplex in Charleroi, Pa., beside an alley leading directly to the Monongahela River.

One involved a band of hobos that squatted on the riverbank, a story that came to mind after being shown last week the photo of Shovel Row, above, in the archives of the Charleroi Area Historical Society.

A few of the kids from the neighborhood sneaked down there one day and spied through the weeds on the homeless tramps gathered around a fire pit and drinking whiskey or moonshine in the mid-afternoon. Some were eating from tin cans while others hunched under lean-tos. The scene quickly scared me back home.

Mom hated that house from day one because it also was parked beside busy railroad tracks and she feared for the safety of her three young boys. Ours was a rental among a row of 10 double houses constructed in the late 19th century for workers of a nearby iron works that fed its shovel factory. Beyond, up the steep hills of the valley, sat the wealthy downtown district and mansions where the local merchants and bankers lived.

The Charleroi High School football field’s north end post was no more than 30 feet from the rear, second-floor bedroom window in our apartment. During each Friday night home game, we gathered at that window to watch the action on the field from what dad thought was the best seat in the stadium, especially because it was free.

Those in the paying seats of better means probably looked at us as white trash.

But it didn’t matter to us, especially one night when Charleroi’s Myron “Mike” Pottios kicked a scoring field goal and the ball bounced over the field’s tall wooden fence into our backyard. For a moment, it was almost as if a million dollars had fallen from the sky into our possession.

Pottios, a native of Van Voorhis, went on to be drafted in 1961 by the Pittsburgh Steelers and 12-year career in Pro Football.

In short order, we moved away from Shovel Row and the pesky, busybody landlady who lived next door in an identical clapperboard house.

Today, just two of them survive covered in vinyl siding, including the one where we lived. The stadium is still there, too, as is the brick shovel factory that became headquarters of the Model Cleaners dry cleaning company.

A business that deals in propane is situated closest to the river on land where the lower row of five worker houses once stood.

Trash is strewn around the path leading to the place where the hobos once sought shelter. The fire pit is still there in the center of a few concrete blocks that double as seats for the loafers who tossed their empty beer cans into the flames.

One two worker houses remain along Shovel Row in July 2009. We lived in the right side of the second duplex from the right.

The Hobbit garage

Walter Rockwell’s love of carnivals could explain his fascination with whimsical architecture.

During his adult life in the early 1900s, Rockwell built several round buildings in the Charleroi, Pa., area, including this fanciful garage behind a mansion on a hill overlooking the borough.

Built at the end of a narrow alley behind Prospect Avenue, it’s floor once rotated with the help of ball bearings and chains so drivers didn’t have to steer backwards for nearly a block to reach the main road.

Rockwell earned the degree of master electrician after having worked for seven years building carnival attractions. He was best known during his time for building the “Crazy House” and “Japanese Bowling Alleys” at Shady Grove Amusement Park in Uniontown, Pa., his birthplace, according to the Charleroi Area Historical Society.

He also was instrumental in building the historic Coyle Theater in Charleroi, a former burlesque house that is about to be restored.

Another identical garage in town has been demolished. It was built for a funeral home’s hearse. The one shown in the photo was designed for the Monier family.

Ironically, he built a mansion with round rooms in nearby Carroll Township for the Coyle family, one that doubles as the Demon House spookfest each fall.

A Socialist's story unfolds

CHARLEROI, Pa. – Darlene Pennline’s mother gathered all documents linking their family to the Socialist Party and tossed them into the flames of a coal furnace in the 1950s.

The files were destroyed because U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy had launched the Red Scare, an intense mission to expose and prosecute communists and their likes in a wide-reaching witch-hunt.

“My grandfather wanted all of that stuff concerning his father out,” said Pennline, 72, of Charleroi, Pa., a former retail center in the heart of steel-making country.

And so the family’s impressive story of their ancestor, Louis Goaziou, was swept under the rug, discussed only in whispers, until the last surviving Goaziou died in April 2008

The death of Herbert Goaziou reopened the doors to his grandfather’s intact Charleroi print shop that barely changed since the early 1900s, when Louis Goaziou began publishing a newspaper that promoted the Socialist mission.

It’s an astounding collection of a bygone era with a story of international interest because of its connection to the French Socialist movement, said Ronald A. Baraff, director of museum collections and archives at the Steel Industry Heritage Corp., whose employees came to Charleroi last week after hearing about the print shop.

“To walk in and it be unchanged and to have that story all in one place is phenomenal,” Baraff said this month at the 807 Fallowfield Ave. building.

Louis Goaziou was born March 22, 1864, in Scrignac County in the French province of Brittany, where his family raised him to be a priest.

But he shunned the rigidity of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Pennline said, and became involved in France’s radical workers’ movement after experiencing hardships while employed in a coal mine.

Goaziou immigrated to America in 1880 and settled in Charleroi, where he began about 20 years later publishing a French-language newspaper, L’Union Des Travailleurs, which, when translated, means the union of workers.

He used the newspaper to spread Socialist propaganda, which pushed the importance of workers pooling their resources to benefit their families and neighbors. He has been called by the French a militant and “the most remarkable figure” of the Franco-American Socialist movement.

The Charleroi area was a hotbed for union activism under the leadership of Goaziou, who also founded the Co-Masons that gave women equal rights to join the organization.

As many as 40 percent of the steelworkers in nearby Donora could have been considered socialists for rejecting World War I. Goaziou hosted a visit in Charleroi in 1911 by Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president on the Socialist ticket. He also helped to organize volatile labor rallies, one of which was attended by Mother Jones, a fierce labor and community organizer who was popular in the coalfields.

In 1908, Goaziou became the first president of the American Federation of Human Rights, which wanted its members to shun ignorance, keep high standards of honor and support social justice for men and women. He had noble ambitions, Pennline said, in an era before communism and socialism became associated with oppression after the 1917 Russian Revolution.


After his March 31, 1937, death at age 73, the printing business was owned by his son, Herbert, and passed along to his grandson, Herbert, who stopped printing on his 90th birthday on May 25, 2003.

Pennline is Louis Goaziou’s great-granddaughter, and a niece of the Herbert Goaziou who recently died and never had any children. She has vowed to dedicate her retirement to turning the print shop into a museum in partnership with the Charleroi Area Historical Society.

The museum is the first step in developing a walking and driving tour of Charleroi, whose downtown with Belgium-influenced architecture was included in September on the National Registry of Historic Districts.

The Goaziou story also prompted the National Park Service to dispatch a photographer to Charleroi last week to document the building. The photos will be added to the public digital files of the National Library of Congress.

Despite the loss of the family’s Socialist files, the Goazious kept just about every other record down to the shop’s first contract April 27, 1910, for power from West Penn Electric Co.

They weren’t much for show, having just painted the walls in the shop once in a dull battleship gray. Several dusty and faded nude photos of pinups were attached to the wall behind the three printing presses, including one of actress and 1930s sex symbol Jean Harlow.

The presses are known in the industry as platen jobbers that date to the 1840s and are considered to be America’s contribution to the printing industry.

Pennline has been asked to refrain from moving anything in the pressroom until a preservation expert is consulted to date the presses and devise a preservation plan, said Nikki Sheppick, the historical society’s secretary.

She said the shop was deemed the most important among the 1,800 buildings in town that earned the National Registry honor.

“This is the premier site in the puzzle,” Sheppick said.

(First published by the Observer-Reporter)

Exposing a forgotten architect

CHARLEROI, Pa. – Benjamin Trnavsky’s greatest gift to architecture might well have been a 1930s gasoline station in the shape of a tiny cottage with a turret and wood-shingled roof.

The cute brick building in downtown Charleroi, Pa., stood among a time capsule of old buildings that helped the borough’s downtown earn a listing last year on the National Register of Historic Places.

Built as the Diaz Gas Station at the corner of Tenth Street and McKean Ave., the building managed to survive while many others of its kind were dismantled over time, according to Charleroi Area Historical Society records.

Today, the building that also looks like a sunken castle is hardly noticed behind several parked vehicles, including one with a crude sign on its rear window that promotes a bait shop. The owner, Charles Diaz of Charleroi, said he just used the garage for his personal reasons and deflected most of my questions. He said he didn’t like publicity. Sometimes, it takes the will of such a strong-willed independent family to hold onto these types of rare buildings in downtowns, like Charleroi, that struggle to stay alive.

Meanwhile, Trnavsky preferred to be remembered as the architect of the Charleroi Area Junior-Senior High School, a rather plain two story set of classrooms. It’s most unusual feature is a 60s-inspired, curved roof over the auditorium.

His obituary published in June 1976 in The Valley Independent newspaper in nearby Monessen indicated he belonged to the local Lions Club and participated in its minstrel shows when white people, like him, thought it was socially acceptable to perform in blackface. There’s a good chance that the Syracuse University-trained architect who died at age 66 was among those who posed for the photograph, below, that was pulled from the local historical society’s files. If so, he should have spent more time venting his creativity on designing good buildings.

Glad someone else remembered this old theater

CHARLEROI, Pa. – Despite having spent countless hours as a child in the seats of the old Coyle Theater in Charleroi, I have few memories of the place. That’s because I’ve always been a sucker for movies, and lost all sense of time and place after the credits rolled into the story.

Recognizing that at an early age, my parents probably knew they could drop me off at the Coyle in the late 1960s without a babysitter and that I’d stay safely in my seat until the movie ended.

Then I followed the crowd out the isle to the lobby and street and stood there under the lights of the marquee for a few minutes big-eyed, dazed and confused and still under the spell of Hollywood.

There were several other theaters in the Mon Valley at the time, including the Manos in nearby Monessen and the Liberty in Donora. But the Coyle was special because it always carried the best movies and had a mysterious balcony for adults only.

I didn’t know it then but the 999-seat theater at 331 McKean Ave. was built in 1895 for vaudeville and burlesque and originally catered to actors who came to town by paddle boat.

By 1999 the Coyle was shuddered, outsourced by television and mall theaters. The surrounding downtown lost its heart and soul without a theater, and businesses suffered even further from the loss of thousands of steel jobs in the region.

Along came Nancy Ellis, a local woman who had a vision to reopen the theater with a leaking roof and mounting debts from unpaid property taxes. Many people thought she was out of her mind, yet she kept her dream alive for nearly a decade, raising just enough money to repair the roof and stabilize the brick building.

Out of nowhere, Ellis has become a feel-good story drawn from the script of a Broadway musical about a stage lost, only to be resurrected by a song and prayer.

The nonprofit she formed, the Mid-Mon Valley Cultural Trust, was awarded $250,000 last week in proceeds from Pennsylvania’s new slots parlor revenues, those pulled from the purse of a casino that opened in 2007 at The Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Washington County. She now is seeking a project manager to oversee restorations and a local theater group to claim the stage.

Movies are expected to roll again, too, at the Coyle in the fall of 2009. I hope to be among the first in line to grab a ticket and fill in the blanks of faded memories of a downtown where crowds once gathered for a common purpose.



Photo: Observer-Reporter

Metrosexual cowboy

This googly-eyed cowpoke has undergone a makeover from the tips of his big boots to the crown of his ten-gallon hat. The dude’s cheeks are aglow with a fresh coat of brown paint that also puts a sheen to his hulking frame.
The 30-year-old roadside attraction known as “Big Jim” received his new look before being relocated from outside an old welding shop near Charleroi, Pa., to a hotel at the Interstate 70 interchange in Bentleyville. His wardrobe was definitely in need of someone with the style of Calvin Klein.
The 20-foot, 3-ton steel sculpture created by welder Jim Krutz was a rusting mess by the time his descendants decided to sell it after the artist’s death. Their attempt to sell this hunk of primitive art on eBay didn't pan out. The owners of a Best Western came to its rescue, and perched Jim this spring fashion season on a new concrete base beside their establishment. GQ magazine has yet to send a photographer to the scene.